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Scientific Cooperations

We are working on multi-scale models of the brain, including data-driven theory, bottom-up simulations and functional top-down models. Our institute realizes the research goals in close cooperations with experimental and theoretical groups. Here you find a list of our partners.

Scientific Cooperations (selection, in alphabetical order)

Moshe Abeles, The Leslie and Susan Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisiplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel.
The way in which perceptions, memories, intentions, etc., are represented in the nervous activity of the brain is not known. The main focus of Moshe Abeles' field of investigation is to discover these representations and understand the neuronal mechanism which generates them. Read more

Tonio Ball's research focuses on (i) recording and analysis of electrophysiological data in humans, (ii) functional MRI and (iii) functional anatomy of the cortical motor system. See here for more details.

Andrew Davison is leading the Neuroinformatics group at UNIC. His main research interests are in large-scale, data-constrained, biologically-detailed modelling of neuronal networks. See here for more info on his work.

Gaute Einevoll, Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology, Norwegian University of Life Sciences (UMB), Aas, Norway.

Gaute Einevoll's present research activity is in computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics where he has a cross-disciplinary research group at UMB. He is interested in various problems related to the function of nerve cells and networks of nerve cells. More specifically he presently works on: the interpretation of electrical potentials measured extracellularly in the brain, neuron and network models of sensory processing (vision, whisking), network models for populations of nerve cells in cortex, interaction between nerve cells and glia cells, and the development of simulation tools. See here for more information.

Ichiro Fuchita's group studies the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and recognition. See here for more information.

George Gerstein, Institute of Neurological Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

George Gerstein's laboratory studies the nervous system at the level of neuronal assemblies both experimentally and with computer modeling. The experiments involve technology to record in parallel the spike train activity of some 20 neurons in a small brain region. See here for more information on his work.

Marc-Oliver Gewaltig holds a Ph.D. in Physics. From 1998, he worked for Honda R&D Europe in Offenbach/Main, Germany. In 2003, he became Project Manager for Computational Neuroscience at the Honda Research Institute Europe, where he developed detailed columnar models of information processing in the primate visual cortex. In 2011, he joined the Blue Brain Project to head the Neurorobotics group. He has a strong interest in the computer science and technology for large-scale neural simulations. He is co-author of the neural simulation tool NEST and co-founder of the NEST Initiative. See here for more information.

Rob Kass' research focus has been in Bayesian inference and, beginning in 2000, in the application of statistics to neuroscience. He is known not only for his methodological contributions, but also for several major review articles. See here for more information.

Pedro Maldonado is Professor at the Biomedical Sciences Institute and Principal Investigator at the Biomedical Neurosciences Institute and Neuroscience of Memory Center at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago, see here.

Karlheinz Meier is a professor of experimental physics at Heidelberg University in Germany. He received his PhD in 1984 from Hamburg University. For more than 30 years he worked in experimental particle physics, contributing to several experiments at the CERN and DESY laboratories. He designed and implemented a large-scale data selection system for an LHC experiment at CERN: Since 2005 he has shifted his interest towards custom hardware implementations of neural circuits. He has initiated and led 2 major European initiatives in the field (FACETS and BrainScaleS) and is currently co-director of the Human Brain Project. See here for more information.

Kenji Morita, Physical and Health Education, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo, Japan.

The group is interested in unraveling principles of information processing in neural systems. A central approach is to design mathematical and computational models of neural function and animal behavior. In close collaboration with experimental partners, the performs analyses of physiological and behavioural data and put our models to test. See here for more information.

The group aims at elucidating the mechanisms underlying the maturation of neuronal networks under physiological and pathophysiological conditions. It assesses the role of early network oscillations for the development of communication in the brain in relationship with cognitive behavior and multisensory perception. The group combines electrophysiological methods and optogenetics with imaging and behavioral assessment. The following main topics are being investigated: (i) Development of neuronal networks accounting for cognitive processing; (ii) Uni- and multisensory processing and ontogeny; (iii) Dysfunction of neuronal networks and their early oscillations under pathological conditions (e.g. neuropsychiatric disorders, perinatal hypoxia-ischemia). See here for more information.

The focus of Gordon Pipa's research is on understanding how information processing and cognitive phenomena can arise from the collective self-organization of elements interacting across many spatial and temporal scales. In particular, we study (1) synchronization of neuronal activity in delay-coupled systems, (2) information processing in self-organized complex systems in different dynamical states, i.e. self-organized criticality, and (3) the use of time series analysis for understanding how information flow can take place between neural activity occurring at different spatial and temporal scales. See here for more information.

Hans Ekkehard Plesser, Department of Mathematical Sciences and Technology, Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

Hans Ekkehard Plesser is a longterm collaborator on our NEST activities. See here for more information about his work and background.

Institutional Collaborations (selection)

We are closely linked to several national and international research institutions and facilities. Among others, these are:

The „National Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience“ (NNCN) is a funding initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) that fosters the research discipline of Computational Neuroscience. It establishes regional centers and nation-wide interconnections. Read more.